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With its telephone-based polls of homemakers, politicians
stumping on the campaign trail, and the looming threat of hanging
chads from paper ballots, the 2012 rumble between Romney and
Obama felt almost archaic.

That’s all about to change, however. Futurists, technology
visionaries and science fiction authors posit some tremendous
change, such that the election of 2020 -- just eight short years
off -- will be largely unlike today’s.

From campaigning to polling to the process of voting itself, the
election 2020 will be different. No, we won’t have
mind-controlled ballots or eyeball scanners for security. But we
could have Facebook.

"Everyday, cheap technologies—digital cameras—could form the
basis for a relatively inexpensive system of voter
identification," wrote Charles Stewart III, a political scientist
with MIT and a member of the Caltech / MIT Voting Technology
Project. A Facebook of sorts, in other words, with the
actual faces of voters and maintained by individual states to
verify a person’s identity.

Those who aren't currently in the system could have their images
captured at the polling place, he suggested. "A voter's identity
could easily and quickly be confirmed by a pollworker who has
access to an electronic pollbook,” Stewart added.

But well before voters make it to the booths, politics itself
will have changed in 2020.

The ramp up to the election in, say, 2018 or '19, should be very
different than today, said science fiction author Daniel Abraham, who
was nominated last year for a prestigious Hugo Award. Current
political scientists rely heavily upon data analysis to hone
their messages for the demographic. But as the databases full
of information on us stack up -- thanks to all those clicks on
Google and social networks like Facebook -- they’ll be able to
write political ads for individuals, not groups.

"The more we learn about brain function, the more we're going to
be able to tailor political messages to how people's brains
work," Abraham told FoxNews.com. "With the data profiles we're
already building based on individual people's habits and
behaviors, correlating that with brain function could lead to
individually tailored political ads: 'Kathy, we know how
important motherhood is to you. Here is what our health
care reform will mean for your daughter, Susie, and her kidney
problem.'"

Creepy? Maybe. But that’s the future. Possibly, anyway.

Despite widespread efforts to modernize a voting process that
hasn't seemed to evolve in decades, technology has had little
impact to date. The biggest effort involved the introduction of
electronic voting machines from companies such as Diebold
Election Systems Inc., since renamed Premier Election Solutions.

Something is bound to change by 2020. At that point, the country
will be awash in information about the race not from pollsters
but from machines -- and from video games. After all, people
barely answer their home phones today.

Pollsters won’t call you in 2020 as they did in 1936, when George
Gallup invented his system, explained David Rothschild, a
Columbia fellow and an economist with Microsoft research in New
York.

"In eight years, there’s not going to be a telephone without a
screen," Rothschild told FoxNews.com. His group has been working
on a new way to poll, using big data: While people watched the
debates using the live TV feature in their Xbox game consoles,
they asked questions and then pored over the results.

Rothschild acknowledged that Xbox users aren’t exactly an
ordinary demographic. But by parsing the data, he said meaningful
information can be teased out. And by 2020, Xbox game consoles
may be far more common than today.

"The people watching debates on gaming systems in 2012 may be
extreme. In 2016 and 2020, interactive TV is going to be the
norm," he said.

And that whole secret ballot thing? Fugghedabouddit, Abraham
said.

"As we get more sophisticated electronic voting, that the idea of
a secret ballot is going to come under question. Verifying that
electronic and Internet-based voting is actually recording the
right information is going to make secrecy a luxury," Abraham
told FoxNews.com.

That's for those voters who make it down to a local polling
place, of course. By 2020, more and more people will simply be
voting online, others argue.

"The Internet will be increasingly used to transmit blank ballots
to remote voters, who can print them out, indicate their choices
on the printed ballots, and return them via postal mail,” Stewart
wrote.

But why wait for the future? Several social media sites seemingly
beamed here from the future can tell you today who won the Nov. 8
2020 election. Spoiler alert: it will have been a nail-biter.